How to Learn, How to Teach English

In short: The best site for English teachers on the internet. If you only have time to visit one site a day, this should be it. What do you need? Activities for you classroom? They got ‘em. Training to make you a better teacher? Oh heck yeah. A worldwide community to bounce ideas off of, get help from, and have fun with. Si. Da. Nae. Hai. Tak. Yes. Yes. Yes.

Watch this clip from the movie “Good Will Hunting”. You can also read the transcript below. Use a good dictionary to look up any words you don’t know.

Below the transcript, there are explanations for all of the idioms in the clip. There are also a few extra notes on what’s happening. After you’ve learned them, write practice sentences with them and post them in the comments. We’ll let you know if you’re using them correctly.

This exercise is best for students who have seen Good Will Hunting. For those who haven’t seen the movie, here’s an explanation of what happens before this scene.

Will (Matt Damon) is a young man who is a genius. It seems like he knows everything. However, he also gets in a lot of trouble. He fights a lot. One day after he is arrested, he has a choice. Either, he can go to a psychologist Sean (Robin Williams) or he has to go to jail. He chooses the psychologist, but the psychologist has trouble helping him. During their first meeting Will is very mean. He says some bad things about the psychologist’s wife. He didn’t know that she had died. The psychologist gets very angry. The scene below is their next meeting.

Now read the transcript of the movie clip.

WILL: So what’s this? A Taster’s Choice moment[1] between guys? This is really nice. You got a thing for swans[2]? Is this like a fetish? It’s something, like, maybe we need to devote some time to[3]?

SEAN: I thought about what you said to me the other day, about my painting.

WILL: Oh?

SEAN: Stayed up half the night thinking about it. Something occurred to me, I fell into a deep peaceful sleep, and I haven’t thought about you since. You know what occurred to me?

WILL: No.

SEAN: You’re just a kid. You don’t have the faintest idea what you’re talking about.

SEAN: So, if I asked you about art, you’d probably give me the skinny[5] on every art book ever written. Michelangelo. You know a lot about him. Life’s work, political aspirations, him and the pope, sexual orientation, the whole works[6], right? But I bet you can’t tell me what it smells like in the Sistine Chapel. You’ve never actually stood there and looked up at that beautiful ceiling. Seen that….

If I ask you about women, you’d probably give me a syllabus of your personal favorites. You may have even been laid[7] a few times. But you can’t tell me what it feels like to wake up next to a woman and feel truly happy.

You’re a tough kid. I ask you about war, you’d probably uh…throw Shakespeare at me, right? “Once more into the breach, dear friends.”[8] But you’ve never been near one. You’ve never held your best friend’s head in your lap, and watched him gasp his last breath looking to you for help.

I ask you about love, you probably quote me a sonnet. But you’ve never looked at a woman and been totally vulnerable…known someone that could level you[9] with her eyes. Feeling like God put an angel on Earth just for you…who could rescue you from the depths of Hell.

And you wouldn’t know what it’s like to be her angel, and to have that love for her be there forever. Through anything. Through cancer. And you wouldn’t know about sleepin’ sittin’ up in a hospital room for two months, holding her hand because the doctors could see in your eyes that the terms visiting hours don’t apply to you. You don’t know about real loss, because that only occurs when you love something more than you love yourself. I doubt you’ve ever dared to love anybody that much.

I look at you: I don’t see an intelligent, confident man. I see a cocky, scared shitless[10] kid. But you’re a genius, Will. No one denies that. No one could possibly understand the depths of you. But you presume to know everything about me because you saw a painting of mine and you ripped my fuckin’ life apart.

You’re an orphan, right? Do you think I’d know the first thing about how hard your life has been, how you feel, who you are, because I read Oliver Twist?[11] Does that encapsulate you?

Personally, I don’t give a shit[12] about all that, because you know what? I can’t learn anything from you I can’t read in some fuckin’ book. Unless you wanna talk about you, who you are. And I’m fascinated. I’m in. But you don’t wanna do that, do you, sport[13]? You’re terrified of what you might say. Your move, chief[14].

Now write sentences Now write sentence with the new words and idioms you learned. Post them in the comments if you’d like them to be corrected.

Finally, answer these reaction questions.

How would you react if you were Will?

Do you think Sean is a good psychologist? Why/Why not?

What do you think will happen to Will in the future?

[1] A Taster’s Choice moment: Refers to a TV commercial for the coffee Taster’s Choice. In the commercials, people shared nice moments together

[2] You got a thing for swans?: To have a thing for me to be attracted to something.

[3] To devote some time to something: This is a common expression used when describing what a patient and a psychologist discuss. Will is using it to suggest that he is the psychologist and Sean is the patient.

[4] Why thank you…It’s all right: Will is being sarcastic. Sean pretends he was serious.

In short: A lot of pretty good stuff. Nice dialogues present idioms and expressions. The TOEFL vocab quizzes are good. Proverbs are well-defined. The readings will help intermediate to upper-intermediate students and they come with excellent comprehension questions.

Unfortunately, a lot of things also seem incomplete. For instance, the conversations from movies are nice, but readers can’t understand them because you don’t know what happened before you start reading. And there are no comprehension questions to go with them.

In general, the whole site is organized/labled poorly. After clicking around for over an hour, it was pretty easy to find everything, but it shouldn’t take that long.

For students: You might enjoy visiting this site every morning and clicking on “Conversations” to learn a new expression. Then, you can try to use it later in the day.

For teachers: If you’re preparing your students for a test like the TOEFL, but the TOEFL readings are too difficult, these readings are excellent preparation while the students work to raise their levels a bit more.

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